Cold War Art Worlds: South Asian Art and Artists in Prague, 1947-1989

Join us for the Book Launch of Cold War Art Worlds: South Asian Art and Artists in Prague, 1947-1989 by Simone Wille, accompanied by a conversation with Dr. Diva Gujral.

Cold War Art Worlds by Simone Wille examines how Prague became a pivotal hub for South Asian artists between 1947 and 1989. Treating cultural mobility as a catalyst for exchange and network building, the book complicates Cold War binaries of East and West. Drawing on extensive archival research, Wille reveals new narratives of decolonisation, migratory aesthetics, and transnational artistic solidarity that reshape global modernisms.

Date: 22 November 2025

Time: 4PM

Venue: WH51, Common Room, Alserkal Arts Foundation (Location Pin)

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Bio:

Simone Wille is an art historian of 20th century modernist and contemporary art, working at the intersections of transnational modernism, mobility studies, and historical transition. Her research focuses in particular on historic and artistic entanglements and cultural mobility between South and West Asia and Europe in the 20th century. She thereby examines decolonisation and the way this has co-produced the larger art world.

She has recently directed the research project South Asia in Central Europe: The Mobility of Artists and Art Works between 1947 and 1989, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (V880-G).

Wille has published widely. Her single authored book “Cold War Art Worlds: South Asian Art and Artists in Prague, 1947-1989” will is published by Leuven University Press and available from November 2025.

Dr Diva Gujral is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford. Working between historical and art historical scholarship of independent India, her research interests include postcolonial modernisms; transnational connections in visual culture; and South Asian contemporary art as a conduit into the region’s competing historiographies. Her PhD thesis ‘Picturing Non-Alignment: Photography, nation-building and identity in India, c. 1950-1975’ (UCL 2021) explored the development of Indian film and photographic modernism against the backdrop of India’s Cold War diplomatic networks and exchanges. Gujral is co-author of Photography in India: A Visual History from the1850s to the Present (Prestel Verlag, 2019), and has written for Aperture, Frieze, and Source.

Photo credits: Shakir Ali, Birds in Flight and Flowers, 1966, oil on canvas, 167 x 470 cm. Inv. no. VU 100/67, acquisition--donated by the artist in 1967, photographed by Lukas Havlena. Courtesy of the Lidice Art Collection, Lidice Memorial.